Bret Smith

CEO and Founder, HiP

Bret Smith is the CEO and Founder of HiP, a full-service B2B demand generation agency and engaged data provider established in 2009. His involvement with IMA began with Shawn Elledge’s prior organization, Integrated Marketing Summit (IMS).

With 30 years of marketing, sales and business development experience, Bret has become widely known as a forward-thinking leader in Demand Generation, Content Marketing, and Behavior Data. He has presented in countless webinars, spoken at numerous tradeshows, written and contributed a plethora of articles and blog posts and was named a “Top 25 Marketing Influencer” by InsideView.

His advances in the execution of marketing technology have led him to serve many high-profile clients including Google, Microsoft, Pitney Bowes Software, Lexmark, CenturyLink, Harvard Business Review, Underwriters Laboratories, Alteryx and others. HiP itself serves clients like Aberdeen, Marketo, Tealium, Workfront, Procore, Dude Solutions, HG Data, Kronos, UserTesting, Exact, Ion Interactive, PeopleFluent, SYNTHio, Progress Coaching and many more. HiP also has large relationships with the major B2B content syndicators and delivered over 700,000 qualified leads to clients last year.

Since founding HiP, Bret has built quite a following, with 29,000 1st-degree connections on LinkedIn, 184,000+ Twitter followers and his personally moderated LinkedIn group, “Demand Generation and Content Marketing”, and its 7,400 members. HiP’s blog is ranked by Forbes as a Top 20 Content Marketing Blog.

Before founding HiP, Bret was a serial entrepreneur and former Head of Americas Sales Prospecting for Pitney Bowes Software. He remains a majority shareholder of WebAttract, a professional services and training organization of B2B webinar experts.

Outside of the office, Bret is a loving husband with six children and six grandchildren. He is also an active and outspoken advocate for many “liberal” causes.